“Ridiculous,” the director said, and he’d begun to pace up and down the room now, a delicate-looking man of her father’s age, wearing whiskers. “Do you really expect me to believe that the merest trace of this substance—two hundred fifty millionths of a gram—can have any effect whatever? Especially for a man of your size—what do you weigh, Albert? Seventy kilograms?”

“Seventy-two.”

“There, you see? A man of seventy-two kilos affected by a barely measurable dose?” He’d reached the windows and come back again, twice, and now he swiveled round on his feet and pointed a finger at Herr Hofmann—and at her, her too, because she was indivisible from this. “There’s something very wrong here. Either that or you’ve discovered the alchemist’s elixir.”

Herr Hofmann tried to interject, but the director waved him off. “No, no, Albert, I’m sorry, but this is just too fantastic to be credible. I’m going to need to see all your laboratory notes, everything you’ve done with these lysergic acid amides, and I want to be personally involved in any further trials—animal or human—so that I can judge for myself.” He paused, the hint of a smile hovering over his lips. “You’re a solid man, Albert, one of the best we have, and I know as well as anyone here that you’re not given to miscalculation, exaggeration—or what, fantasy?” The director let out a little laugh. “You’re not a fantasist now, Albert, are you?”

Whether he was or not—and, of course, the director was just having a little joke—the compound Herr H. had discovered was simply too intriguing to resist, and within the week the director himself, and Professor Stoll too, had come to him for a trial dose, and so they became the second and third human guinea pigs to experiment with the drug. They remained incredulous regarding the dosage right up to the moment of ingestion, but Herr Hofmann, insisting that the quantity he himself had taken was an overdose, gave his colleagues less than a third of that, 60 micrograms only, and yet both reported the most astonishing effects, seeing lights, colors, experiencing synesthesia and visual distortions, though neither suffered the terrifying visions Herr H. had summoned, nor the glorious ones either. Which Herr H. attributed to the reduced dosage. Still, the effects were beyond what anyone could have expected, and both men encouraged him to continue trials, which he did succeed in doing on separate occasions with two other volunteers from the Chemistry Department.